Librarians as campus webmasters

[Mark McFarland]

Melinda et al,

I have been co-campus webmaster for almost 2 years now.  The campus server
was originally managed by a computation center person who very early
on called me up and asked if I wanted to help grow/manage/support the
campus server.  I said yes and since that time our 2-person, 2-unit
collaboration has grown into a team approach.  We now have what we 
call Team Web.  Team Web consists of more than a dozen people who donate 
their time and talents to supporting the server.  There are programmers, 
graphics people, mail handlers and a kind of informal brain trust that
keeps the service going.   The library has a significant role on this 
team in that we actually operate several important "pages" (the Research 
Web, and the Search Page, and the library web, of course) and conduct 
training and answer mail.

I cannot imagine a better situation.  This seems to work very well - 
the work gets done and campus publishers and users seem satisfied
with the service they get and the product that has emerged from
this campuswide collaboration.  Academic computing, administrative
computing, and the library form the basis of this collaboration.

Mark McFarland
Librarian, Univ of Texas at Austin
m.mcfarland at mail.utexas.edu